Science keeps showing us how little we know

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The ancient footprints on a Norfolk beach are just the latest mystery in the tangled story of our earliest ancestors

It is somehow appropriate that the 850,000-year-old footprints found on a beach in Norfolk last May, and announced last week, have since been washed away. Why? Because the ephemeral nature of that extraordinary discovery underlines the ever-changing nature of scientific knowledge. Science is not a catalogue of known facts; it is the discovery of new forms of ignorance.

For those who thought they knew the history of the human species, the past few years have been especially humbling. There has been a torrent of surprising discoveries that has washed away an awful lot of what we thought we knew, leaving